I have a ratty pink blanket that I put over the sofa bed in my old room here at my father's place when it's folded up but not actually being used as a sofa. It looks like heck, yes, but it does have the advantage of keeping the cat hair off of the sofa if the cats decide to use it.
The pink blanket works.
Or, you know...
Not.
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And now, things.
Material things, I mean.
No doubt it's a sign of getting older, but I'm starting to find that I don't really care about most things. I don't have to have many things. My cell phone's pretty much five years old now because I don't care if I have the latest one. My wardrobe? Well, my wardrobe probably suffers from the fact that I wear a uniform shirt at work. If I didn't I might have to have more wardrobe-y things, true, but I still probably wouldn't have the absolute latest wardrobe things. My television isn't HD, but it works well. My apartment is a one-room with a horrid 70s carpet, but it fits my books and my art stuff and my instruments and has a balcony for my planters, so it'll do. I could go on, but it would be in much the same vein. My life definitely isn't about the latest and greatest things.
Anyone with thing ambition is probably cringing right now, or at least wondering how a person can live that way. Don't I want things? Well, sure. There's lots of things that I see on television that I know would be nice to have, but I don't need them. I don't intend to go into debt for them. I can do without them. I'm not amaterialistic by any means; I just have my own priorities. As my boss said once when we were laughing about the fact that the person who does much of the looking-after of the work blog and twitter account and maintains two blogs of her own doesn't even have a computer at home, " you just haven't bought into it, have you?"
I guess. Either that, or I like the way my life is without adding more things.
When I first moved away from home I used to make mental lists of the things I would save in case of a fire. The list used to be pretty darned long, I'll admit, and probably would have resulted in multiple trips and my eventual death from smoke inhalation. Now? My personal ID, I suppose. Enough clothes to make sure I wasn't freezing to death as I stood outside watching my things going up in flames. Maybe, just maybe, and only if I had time to think about it, a small stuffed bunny...
Ah, there we go. Here's where we hit what things matter. The aforementioned bunny? Just a silly Easter gift my mother gave me just before she died. It was an impulse buy at the grocery store and there's nothing special about it. I wouldn't mourn it if it did disappear, but if I thought about it I might save it. And maybe my grandmother's topaz rings... but again, it honestly wouldn't kill me if I couldn't manage it.
The things that matter to me are the things that have associations, but if the things go away it doesn't mean that the memories do, right?
The other day I was drawing an old conch shell that came down through my other grandmother's family... oh, here. Rather than my typing the whole thing out again, let me just link to the post on the other blog and you can see for yourself if you're so inclined. Anyway, I've told my father that I specifically want the conch shells (juuust in case he ever planned to get rid of them for some reason). They're in my room at the moment, actually, since I'm considering taking them home to do a few more drawings of them. The old conch is a piece of family history. Continuity. A reminder of my childhood. Would I be upset if it disappeared? For a little while, yes.
And then I'd move on.
It's a thing.
Now, admittedly, there have been happenings in my life that have given me the current thingless attitude, most of which I don't want to mention because they're personal (and in one case fairly painful). I'll also concede that it's easier for a single person who plans on remaining single to not care whether she has anything to pass on to her nonexistent children. I just wish, though, that a few more people could find a way to be less thing-y (ok, that sounded funny even to me). Too many people argue over things. Too many relationships have been wrecked by things. Too many of us are in financial hell because of things. And you know what? In the end, they're just things.
And if things are all you have? Well, I guess you learn to be happy in your things.
I'd rather be happy in me.
Kind of a personal thing.
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